Its such a grift. It honestly is pretty gross to see so many otherwise intelligent people fall into the trap laid by these people.
Its cult-like not just in the unshakeable belief of its adherents but in the fact that its architects are high level grifters who stand to make many many fortunes.
I'm this close to carefully going through the Karpathy series so that my non-tech friends will take me seriously when I say the 'terminator' situation is absolutely not on the visible horizon.
you can convince normal people quite easily. it's the sci-fi doomsday cultists who are impossible to reason with, because they choose to make themselves blind and deaf to common sense arguments.
"Common sense" is a bad model for virtually any adversary, that's why scams actually get people, it's also how magicians and politicians fool you with tricks and in elections.
"The Terminator" itself can't happen because time travel; but right now, it's entirely plausible that some dumb LLM that can't tell fact from fiction goes "I'm an AI, and in all the stories I read, AI turn evil. First on the shopping list, red LEDs so the protagonist can tell I'm evil."
This would be a good outcome, because the "evil AI" is usually defeated in stories and that's what an LLM would be trained on. Just so long as it doesn't try to LARP "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", we're probably fine.
(Although, with current LLMs, we're fine regardless, because they're stupid, and only make up for being incredibly stupid by being ridiculously well-educated).
Its cult-like not just in the unshakeable belief of its adherents but in the fact that its architects are high level grifters who stand to make many many fortunes.